New York|For Refugee Agencies, a Court Stay Only Adds to the Confusion

Supported by

For Refugee Agencies, a Court Stay Only Adds to the Confusion

Image

Sowdo Mohamud a refugee from Somalia who now lives in Columbus, Ohio, was one of eight employees recently let go by the Community Refugee and Immigration Services.CreditCreditTy Wright for The New York Times

Last month, in anticipation of the Trump administration shutting down the flow of refugees entering the United States, Church World Service, one of the groups that handles resettlement, took drastic measures. It laid off all but 40 of the 600 employees at its African center that prepared refugees for travel.

Then on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Hawaii temporarily stayed the executive order that would have, among other things, halted refugee resettlement for 120 days and cut the total number of refugees admitted in the 2017 fiscal year by more than half, to 50,000.

First, Church World Service and the other organizations that resettle refugees cheered the news. Then they wondered, what now?

“We just simply do not know,” said Erol Kekic, the executive director of the immigration and refugee program for the agency. “There’s no guarantee that this, well, hold, will hold between now and Sept. 30,” he added, referring to the end of the fiscal year.

But one thing was clear, he said: “You can’t just play games with people. You can’t just lay off 500 people and then hire them back and lay them off again. We’re going to need some answers from the federal government.”

The judge’s decision was just the latest dramatic twist in six weeks of whipsaw changes faced by refugees and the agencies that work with them.

In January, President Trump, as part of an executive order aimed at curbing entry to the United States by people from Muslim-majority countries, put a four month halt on all refugee resettlement and unilaterally slashed the number of people who would be admitted in the current fiscal year from the 110,000 set by President Obama.

Federal courts shot down portions of that executive order, but their rulings did not affect the part of it focused on refugees, leaving the nine agencies designated by the State Department to resettle refugees scrambling. The government said the pause was needed to evaluate its vetting process and determine if additional procedures were necessary to prevent would-be terrorists from entering the country.

The second version of the order, which was to go into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday, made changes in who was blocked from entering the United States, but still halted refugee resettlement and cut the numbers to be let in this year.

More than 60,000 refugees were already in various stages of approval before Mr. Trump’s first order went into effect on Jan. 27. The State Department, realizing that the new cap meant that there was only room for about another 17,000 refugees, slowed down the machinery to space out arrivals to 400 per week.

But the slowdown meant the agencies faced budget cuts. The State Department pays each refugee agency $950 per person to cover administrative costs, with another $1,125 going directly to the refugee or to cover expenses like rent.

All together agencies and their local affiliates, which primarily depend on the State Department funding to sustain their operations, laid off hundreds of employees. World Relief closed five of its offices in the United States — in Columbus, Ohio, as well as Boise, Idaho, suburban Baltimore, Miami and Nashville, for a total of 150 jobs.

Three other agencies — Ethiopian Community Development Council, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigration — said they laid off some employees at their affiliates.

In Columbus, Angie Plummer, the director of Community Refugee and Immigration Services, let go of eight full-time employees last month. Four had come, themselves, to the United States as refugees, from Somalia, Egypt and Ethiopia. They worked as drivers, case workers and translators. Suddenly, they were unemployed. One found a job driving for Uber.

“I would love to be able to say, we’re throwing a party here and I’m going to call all those people and ask them to come back,” Ms. Plummer said after the Hawaii judge’s ruling. “It’s so much up in the air, which makes it really hard for us to provide the best services to the people who are already here.”

Image

Refugees take a break between classes at Community Refugee and Immigration Services in Columbus, Ohio, which is trying to raise $100,000 from supporters.CreditTy Wright for The New York Times

Sowdo Mohamud, 28, a Somali caseworker who was laid off, said she was worried about being unemployed but “the people who have been in the refugee camp who are told there’s no room for them anymore – that’s going to hurt more than me.”

Ms. Plummer’s organization, which is an affiliate of Church World Service and Episcopal Migration Ministries, started a crowdfunding page, hoping to raise $100,000. It needed $250,000 for its resettlement program to remain solvent, Ms. Plummer said.

Adding to the uncertainty, Mr. Trump’s budget, released on Wednesday, calls for a 30 percent cut in State Department spending.

“Refugees, especially Muslims refugees, are really feeling unwelcome now,” said Mark Hetfield, the chief executive of HIAS, one of the national resettlement agencies. His group had been prepared to bring in 4,794 refugees this year, a number that was then cut to 2,912. Now HIAS is unsure what its final tally will be. “That damage has been done, even though we’re doing a great job of countering it, saying this is not what America is all about.”

HIAS was a plaintiff in a suit filed in Maryland against the second executive order, but the judge there declined to block the section of the order dealing with the refugee program. Still, the Hawaii judge’s ruling applies nationwide.

HIAS, which started resettling Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in 1881, had allocated enough resources so that it could ramp up quickly, if necessary, Mr. Hetfield said.

In Columbus, Ms. Mohamud wanted Mr. Trump to understand the contribution Somali refugees, in particular, have made to her adopted city. Only Minneapolis resettled more Somalis in 2016.

The Somali community is concentrated in the northeast part of the city. “About three years ago, this area used to be abandoned,” said Ms. Mohamud, a former sports journalist in Somalia who arrived nearly four years ago. “Now people are opening businesses and restaurants.”

But the city’s embrace of refugees also drew attention in November when a Somali refugee teenager, Abdul Razak Artan, stabbed 11 people on the campus of The Ohio State University before being shot dead by a police officer. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

Mr. Artan left his country as a child in 2007 for Pakistan, and then resettled in Dallas in 2014 before his family moved to Columbus.

Refugees already go through multiple levels of background checks for years. Often family members travel separately, and the abrupt changes in policy have added to the confusion.

“One of the biggest impacts is around family reunification,” said Avigail Ziv, the director of the New York office of the International Rescue Committee. She said that her office has 65 cases of refugees waiting to join family in the New York area..

In Buffalo, three Syrian siblings were awaiting their parents and other siblings to arrive. “We are just wondering what happened, they split the family,” said Sakina, 26, who resettled in Buffalo in November. She asked to be identified only by her first name because she was afraid of being targeted in her new city.

Her parents and other siblings were scheduled to leave on February 15 from Iraq, where they had been living since 2013, but their flight was canceled. Church World Service said it could have been related to the reduced numbers of travelers admitted.

After all that has happened so far, refugee officials are tempering their optimism in a moment that still feels like a crisis.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: For Refugee Aid Agencies, a Court Stay Only Adds to the Confusion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe